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Emotions are involved in virtually every aspect of human cognition, including information processing and decision-making. Thus, to understand political conflict and policy decision-making more fully, we must strive to understand the role of emotions in these phenomena. This paper explores expressed emotions in protests related to the policy decisions around the COVID-19 pandemic. We collect and analyze data on expressed emotions from protests in four U.S. states covered in 185 articles from 66 newspapers. We use an integrated method analysis that incorporates elements of Discourse Network Analysis (DNA) and interpretive analysis of emotions. Our DNA analysis shows differing distributions of emotions across protests against government restrictions and for restrictions to protect vulnerable populations from COVID-19. From these distributions, fear emerges as one of the more prominent emotions linked to an actor's role in the process and the context. We use interpretive analysis of emotions to understand the role of fear better. This paper contributes to the literature in two ways. First, we contribute empirically to the theoretical arguments to integrate structural, cultural, and relational analyses of emotions in politics. Second, we offer a rare combination of methods to code and analyze emotions in texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyses the public dispute over homebirths in Czechia over the past two decades using the concept of 'societalisation'. Drawing on a wealth of empirical material, including media outputs, court proceedings, changes in legislation, expert opinions, and other supplementary materials, the article examines the homebirth dispute on the legislative, judicial, and public policy levels and in relation to the media and experts. The analysis structures the evolution of the dispute into five phases that reflect the evolution of the homebirth issue from the perspective of civil sphere dynamics. One of the key moments in the societalisation process 'code-switching'. In the Czech homebirth context, code-switching occurs when homebirth ceases to be presented in the media solely as a health-care problem, articulated dominantly by doctors as the experts in this field, and it becomes a dispute over human rights and the right to choose as central values of a liberal-democratic political establishment. The concept of societalisation can be used to present a coherent story of the homebirth dispute while maintaining the complexity of the issue and highlighting the civil sphere's important activating role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the focus on emotions has been associated with the rise of psychosocial welfare and has promised a gateway to accommodate individually diversified needs of citizens in policies, the article shows that the role of emotions needs to be better understood. Highlighting emotions can serve both to empower and to patronize those who experience them. Referring to emotions can thus strengthen hierarchies and downplay individual requests to initiate a change. The analysis of professional discourses on birth care in Czechia shows the value of contextualising emotions. While midwifery discourses apply the emotional context of birth to support women in their specific birth choices, medical discourses use the emotional context to patronize them and to limit their requirements. As a result, policy demands are seen as illegitimate when coming from midwives, who want to see women's choices more respected in care. We analyse this dynamic through intimacy. As a conceptual framework used in sociology of care, 'intimacy' ties individual emotional experiences to collective discourses on care, the body and related feelings. Viewing professional discourses on birth care through intimacy reveals the role of emotions in the collective recognition of the personal struggle for the right to give birth in conditions that respect bodily and emotional integrity, which informs how we think of the role of emotions in policies in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]